The SPECviewperf 12 benchmark is the worldwide standard for measuring graphics performance based on professional applications. The benchmark measures the 3D graphics performance of systems running under the OpenGL and Direct X application programming interfaces. The benchmark’s workloads, called viewsets, represent graphics content and behavior from actual applications.

The latest version is SPECviewperf 12.1, released on August 24, 2016. SPECgpc members at the time of V12.1 release include AMD, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Intel, Lenovo, NVIDIA, and VMware. SPECviewperf 12.1 features a new Autodesk 3ds Max viewset, Microsoft Windows 10 support, and GUI and reporting improvements.

SPECviewperf 12.1 has been tested and is supported under the 64-bit version of Microsoft Windows 7 and Windows 10. Results from SPECviewperf 12.1 remain comparable to those from V12.0.1 and V12.0.2.

1920x1080 screen resolution for submissions published on the SPEC website

SPECviewperf reports system memory as gigabytes (GB), even though the actual memory capacity measured and required is in gibibytes (GiB). The use of the term gigabytes is because the term gibibyte is not in broad use and may be confusing. System memory capacity is typically based on the physical memory modules present, which are reported in decimal (GB) despite their internal structure being in binary (GiB). This creates some complexity in virtualization configurations, which may specify and allocate memory to a child OS from the shared pool using decimal (GB). One gigabyte is slightly less than one gibibyte, thus a virtualized workstation may be allocated sufficient gigabytes of memory but fail to meet the minimum required memory to run SPECviewperf. Therefore, for virtualized configurations, memory should be allocated to the child OS sufficient to meet or exceed the minimum memory capacity in binary, where one gibibyte is equal to 1024 to the third power. A few examples are provided below for convenience:

Gibibytes

Minimum Allocated Gigabytes

4

4.295

8

8.590

16

17.18

32

34.36

64

68.72

Beyond the minimum requirements, the SPECgpc group recommends that SPECviewperf 12 be run on a graphics card with at least 1 GB of graphics memory.